It’s an Oscar contender featuring one of the great actors of our time. The costume design is remarkable, and the cinematography gorgeous. Newcomer Vicky Krieps gives a sensitive and memorable performance and it’s written and directed by auteur, Paul Thomas Anderson. Still, none of this is why I think you should see the film Phantom Thread.

My recommendation is more personal than that. I have often written of how I enjoy it when my two loves, fashion and fiction, meet. This is one of those encounters. Phantom Thread portrays a similar character as I wrote about in my novel Silk for the Feed Dogs. Reynolds Woodcock is cut from a similar cloth as Signor Adriani. Alma is the innocent from the outside squaring off against the design genius’s perverse psychological gamesmanship just as Kat had to contend with similar in my tale. Substitute the London of the 1950s…